


The Relationship Guide to Isaac Lahey

by tokillthatmockingbird



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M, and werewolves can keep their scars, in which i pretend that scott and allison are eloquent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-23
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-13 11:40:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 7,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1224970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tokillthatmockingbird/pseuds/tokillthatmockingbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you wake up in the morning, and he isn’t there, don’t panic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a little complied list of things about Isaac Lahey that Allison and Scott wrote together. Or maybe it was just one of them, but I see this being part of their three-way relationship. Okay? Okay. I also might write a chapter for each number. If I can come up with ideas. We'll see!

**1.** If you wake up in the morning, and he isn’t there, don’t panic. You won’t notice him rolling out of bed, but he inevitably does at impossible hours of the morning. You’ll wake up to the smell of coffee in the kitchen and his scent on the pillow next to you, but very rarely will you be greeted with a kiss or his shallow breathing beside you.

 

**2.** On the off chance that you wake before him, try to feign sleep. You’ll feel a hand brush your skin, feel his lips press gently against your temple. He won’t make a sound, except that initial sigh of relief when he sees you tangled in the sheets beside him. No matter how many times you try to convince him that you will never leave him in the night, he won’t believe you. Don’t take it personally. Impermanence is perhaps the only stable thing he’s had in his life.

 

**3.** He will never tell you that he hates your coffee. Or your cookies. Or your baked ziti that you spent four hours trying to cook. He’ll just leave a few sips in the bottom of the mug, a few crumbs on his plate, and in the middle of the night, you’ll hear his bare feet on the kitchen floor.

 

**4.** He can go days without speaking a single word. Learn to read his body language. While he’s perfected the art of lying, he cannot seem to communicate to his body these false messages. His gazes can speak novels if you take the time to decode them. Isaac is expressive in the most atypical and sporadic ways. Take his silences as opportunities to fill yourself with knowledge.

 

**5.** Sometimes, after long battles with creatures in the dark, he’ll watch soap operas at four o’clock in the morning. Or spend thirty minutes leaning out the open window. Or he’ll try to make a pot of spaghetti. If you find him, don’t ask him if he’s okay. Don’t ask him if he needs anything. These are the times that he uses to grapple with the overwhelming humanity of himself. These moments are his own to come back into his independence.

 

**6.** The first few times you see him shirtless, it will shock you. Descriptions couldn’t prepare you for what you will see. But don’t look away. Seeing his scars will become useful to you. They are as much a part of him as his smile is. He might tell you that he doesn’t remember where most of them came from, if you ever have the courage to ask. He’s probably lying.

 

**7.** Tell him you love him. Often. Say it over coffee and during sex and when he brings you a magazine from the living room. If you say it often enough, sometimes you’ll catch the beautiful serenity on his face on the days that he actually believes you. 

 

**8.** He will never admit it, but reality television often amuses him.

 

**9.** He’ll remember your anniversary and that your favorite color’s blue and that on your third date you wore a green shirt, but sometimes he forgets to tell you that he hasn't slept for two days. Or he’ll forget to call and tell you that he got cornered by a rouge Alpha on the way home from the grocery store. Sometimes he forgets that he’s told you about the disasters of his parents, and he’ll pretend to understand when you fret about not being able to see your mother over the Christmas holidays. Try not to hold these things against him.

 

**10.** When he tells you he loves you, grab it and hold it and hide it away for the days that you don’t think he does. Tuck it into your planner, so you can smile at work. Fold it into the laundry so you can remember when you wear your favorite pair of jeans. The times that he says it will be few and far between, but he means them with all his heart.


	2. Chapter 2

Allison wakes with a gasp on her lips. She jolts upright, rocking the bed, and Scott, attentive, straightens hastily. He droops with exhaustion. “What is it?” Scott mumbles, lids barely peeled open. Harsh blades of sunlight shoot through the window blinds and poke him hard in the eyes.

“Isaac.” Allison lays a gentle hand on the empty spot beside her, as if to make sure he is no longer there. The blankets are chill to the touch, wrinkled and lonely. She smells his shampoo on the pillow.

Scott’s spine rolls straight, slowly as he comes into reality. He starts kicking his way out of the blankets, swearing, brown eyes suddenly wide with panic. Allison clambers after him, crawling across the mattress and pulling a knife from the side table. Scott yanks jeans over his hips, one handed as he scrolls desperately through his phone for messages. Allison wiggles into Isaac’s sweater— his scent is clinging from the fabric.

“Where does he go when he panics?” she asks, dressing herself in autopilot.

“I don’t _know_ ,” Scott whines. “He doesn’t think straight. He just bolts.”

“Okay, think, _think_ ,” Allison demands. “What are places that make him feel safe? Comfortable? He wouldn’t go back to his old house, but is there somewhere he went when he was young? A park? Something?”

The door creaks open, and Scott and Allison freeze in their frantic motions. Allison is double over on the bed, fumbling with the laces on her boot. A dagger sticks out of her flyaway bun. The sleeves of Isaac’s sweater droop past her fingertips. Scott has one shoe on and his pants undone. His shirt is hastily mis-buttoned, his hair sticking out at every end. Isaac, matching cups of coffee in each hand, pauses in the doorway.

“Are you guys going somewhere?” he asks uncomfortably. He is barefoot and clean-shaven, curls drying about his head. His sweatpants are cuffed at the bottom, pieces of mown grass are sticking to his toes. The newspaper is tucked under his arm, rubbing ink to his white tee shirt.

Allison and Scott relax, vertebra by vertebra, and share a quiet smile. “Not anymore.”

“Is that coffee for us?” Scott asks, early morning exhaustion filtering through the adrenaline.

Isaac crawls back into bed with them for a while, breathing evenly until he drifts back to sleep.


	3. Chapter 3

Isaac won’t sleep in the middle; he feels too trapped. Allison always wakes up dripping with sweat when she’s framed by the two heat-box werewolves. She’ll sleep there, on cold nights or nights where Scott comes to bed last. But usually, Scott nestles between them. He doesn’t mind curling around Allison, his back flush to Isaac’s.

If Allison leaves early, she tacks a note to the headboard. If Isaac leaves early, he’s learned to stay nearby where Scott can find his heartbeat upon waking. Scott, as a general rule, doesn’t leave early. For Scott McCall, “early” is noon.

Sometimes, he gets rattled from sleep before he’s ready. Bad dreams, Isaac’s twitching, Allison’s rolling. More often than not, a text message from Stiles about some existential crisis involving girls and boys and Scott’s the love expert with the boyfriend and girlfriend at the same time, remember, so he has to have some advice. (He never does.) Now he wakes up to a gray brightness and birds chirping outside the window. Allison slumbers behind him, wrapped tightly in his sweatshirt. Isaac sleeps in front of him, eyes twitching beneath his lids.

Scott hides a wide yawn with a scarred hand and reaches out gently to brush back the boy’s curls. Often times, the darkness weighing Isaac down follows him into his sleep, but sometimes, just sometimes, he is allowed to sleep in peace.

Isaac’s body stiffens awake, and Scott’s eyes flutter closed. He listens to the popping of the boy’s spine as she straightens and stretches long limbs in tight quarters. For a moment, there is silence and then wildly hammering of his heart. A breath rushes from his lips, light and relieved. Scott feels his own heart clench.

There is a rustling in the sheets as Isaac drags himself across them, careful and slow. His fingertips brush the line of Scott’s jaw, and his heat mingles with Scott’s as he leans forward to press a safe, chaste kiss on his temple.

“Thank God,” he breathes. Scott feels invasive now. “Sometimes I think it’s all just a dream. A really, _really_ good dream.”

 


	4. Chapter 4

Allison has stitches healing under her shirt, so when Deaton calls about a mysterious animal attack, she knows better than to leap into action. Isaac and Scott careen out of the house with a kiss on her cheek and a promise to be home for dinner. She doesn’t believe them, but she tries to cook anyway.

They trek home four hours later, covered in swampy mud and grass stains and blood, clothes in tatters, skin knitting back together to form scars. They trudge upstairs wordlessly, and Allison pulls a casserole from the oven when she hears the violent stream of water in the shower. On the counter, the dinner cools, and she sits, cross-legged, at the table, picking at her nail beds and waiting.

When they come back down, they look bone-tired but serene, which means whatever Big Bad crawled out of the woods was taken care of. Allison passes around her baked ziti, and Scott devours it like he hasn’t eaten in three weeks. Isaac pecks, like a bird, chewing each bite thoughtfully. They don’t talk much. The television plays an old romantic comedy in the other room.

They turn into bed after late night decaf, and after the blankets are pulled to their chins, Scott snaps into an impossibly deep REM cycle. Allison lets him curl around her. With his nose nuzzled into the nape of her neck, she falls asleep. 

What feels like minutes later, she wakes to the depression and release of a mattress bowing under someone’s weight. Isaac pads carefully out of the room, stomach growling. Allison hears the rattling of glass jars in the fridge door as he roots around the kitchen. The chatter of dry bits of cereal in a ceramic bowl. 

She rolls out of bed, and Scott shivers into her emptiness. Wrapping her arms around her chest, she waddles downstairs, awkward with the pinch of the sutures in her side. In the doorway, she laughs, watching Isaac pour his second bowl. “You could have just said you didn’t like the ziti,” she says.

Isaac looks up, guilty, spoon in hand. He just grimaces a smile. “Next time.”

Next time it was her coffee, and he made a brand new pot as soon as she left the house. Scott was sworn to secrecy, but Allison knows. She put half a cracker of pepper in her pot, waiting for him to fulfill his promise. He never would. It didn’t upset her.


	5. Chapter 5

It’s a Thursday when Scott throws himself onto the couch beside Allison, brow drawn in concern. She looks up from the Bestiary that’s resting on her knees, teases a pencil out of her ponytail. “What was the last thing Isaac said to you?” he asks curiously.

Allison ponders for a few moments. “I’m not sure. Why?”

Scott straightens, crosses his legs, looks right at her. “I’m serious. Think really hard. What was the last thing Isaac said to you?”

Allison snaps the spine of the book shut, screws up her eyes in concentration. She muddles through the mythological creatures, through dinner time and breakfast time, through passing each other in the hallway. She shrugs her shoulders, careless. “I really can’t remember.”

“Me neither,” Scott admits, and his look of concern makes Allison nervous. Should she be more concerned about this? “Allison, I don’t think he’s said anything in a few days.”

Allison rolls her eyes. “That’s a little dramatic.”

“Is it?” Scott pleads. “The last conversation I had with you was about how I always burnt the toast. Just a few hours ago.” Allison opens her mouth to respond. “The one before that was about buying your dad a Father’s Day present.  And before that, about who paid the electric bill last month.” 

But that is like Scott, to remember the little things no one cares about. Allison still cannot find a reason to be truly concerned. She rolls her eyes slightly, huffs with laughter, and starts leafing through the Bestiary again.

“The last conversation I  _ think _ I had with Isaac,” Scott says, “was about getting Deaton to check him for poison after that run in with the Cornish pixies.”

Allison lowers the book. “Scott, that was—”

“Two days ago!” Scott exclaims. “That was two whole days ago.”

“Shit.”

 

They spend the next day trying to coax words from his lips. Randomly posed questions which he ignores under the guise of not being able to hear them. Trying to draw him into conversation. Allison muses out loud if she looks pretty enough to go out to the bar with Lydia— a plea for attention in which she has never used before. Scott complains about a pounding headache. Isaac continues to read in silence. He finishes his book by the end of the day.

 

They start to notice small things. The tick in his jaw when he’s angry. The jerk of his spine when he’s scared. His brows raise when he’s amused, chin lifts when he’s aroused. They categorize a list of movement. Glints in eyes and taps on knuckles. The furling and unfurling of his fingers when he starts to panic. They fill in the gaps of his words with subtle physicality, until by the end of the week, they could recite his body without flaw. 

Father’s Day is two days away. The Sheriff (with Stiles), Melissa, and Chris were coming by their place to celebrate with beers and barbeque and music. The Martins were stopping by after their dinner reservation. The Yukimuras hadn’t RSVPed. Derek promised to come by early and provide the alcohol. 

“Do you think Isaac has someone he wants to invite?” Scott asks with a heavy, sad sigh.

Allison shakes her head. “If there was someone to invite, don’t you think we would have heard about them before now?” 

Scott silently agrees and looks over their scribbled plans. His shoulders sink. “Do you think he’s okay with this?” he asks. “I just… I don’t want to stir up any bad memories for him—”

“Scott, you’ve been having Father’s Day with the Stilinskis for more than a decade. You can’t just cancel it now.”

“It’s just… whenever we brought it up, he’d always stiffen up, you know?” Scott says. “He’d start tapping his fingers and biting his lip, like he was nervous. I don’t want him to be nervous about it. He’s supposed to be safe here.” 

Allison nods, understanding and simultaneously baffled. Their situation has never been an easy one. There was no equation to a threesome relationship, no standard to family holidays when one member had no family to bring. 

“Let’s… why don’t we ask him?” Allison stammers. “It can’t hurt. You ask. You’re better with the asking. I’ll watch. Make sure we’re doing the right thing. If I see anything out of the ordinary, we can call it off.”

When they ask him, Isaac’s brow is drawn. “Don’t cancel it because of me.” His voice is hoarse from lack of use. His eyes widen in shock at his own words. Scott and Allison watch and listen carefully. “Your families… they’re my family too, right?”

He smiles, and Allison and Scott don’t need to read anything into that to know how genuine it is.


	6. Chapter 6

Three weeks ago, Allison and Stiles took to tracking down a chupacabra that had killed three old men at the local nursing home. Lydia and Allison had embarrassingly gone undercover in candy stripes and stupid hats, gathered intell, reported back home. Three weeks of sniffing around the woods after dark, of sitting down to bright desk lamps and hard-backed chairs until three o’clock in the morning to finish their schoolwork. Pots of black coffee and take-out containers. Aching tiredness. Never a moment alone.

It is hard, sometimes, most of the time, to balance the supernatural with the natural.

They kill the beast near the bluffs where they run the hiking trail. Deaton comes by to help burn the remains, and at some point after midnight, it starts raining. Allison’s car smells like wet dog by the time they get home. Scott, burning with adrenaline and excitement over their success, corrals Allison and Isaac into the kitchen while he makes them their first homemade meal in a week. Allison wraps numb fingers around a lukewarm mug of coffee. Isaac stares out the window, hypnotized.

Scott is the only one chattering, Allison the only one half-answering. It makes it easy for Isaac to scoop up his plate and disappear. The others don’t notice his absence until they hear the screen door bang shut and the pattering of rain intensified. Allison cranes her neck around the corner. The front door is kicked open wide. Their porch light is flickering orange, casting deep shadows over Isaac’s slim figure. He stands on the creaking hardwood of their front porch, a plateful of lasagna in one hand, a poised fork in the other. He watches the rain.

“Should I go talk to him?” Scott asks. He is a man of emotional comfort, who believes in auditory stimulants, soothing voices and careful words. Allison shakes her head. She watches Isaac watch the rain.

“Later.”

Scott nods. He is the one with the right words. Allison is the one with the right timing. Alone, they are semi-awkward, unsure. Together, they piecemeal into a sturdy force of nature. Isaac is safe with them. They are there when he needs them, and they step away when he doesn't.

Isaac abandons his plate on the rocking chair and steps into the rain.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So basically, I took liberties in this chapter to make up stuff about werewolf healing. I don't know. I felt it was cheap for their bodies to completely heal old scars. I think scars are an important part of people. Scars tell stories. And I like that idea. So yes, this is a little canon divergent, but I hope it's not too out there.
> 
> Also if anyone has read The Scarlet Letter, they might understand why Scott (I) think Pearl is terrifying. Scary little girl.

Scott sees it first. It’s when they’re teenagers, and Isaac lives in the room next door. It’s four o’clock in the morning, and Scott is on his third Mountain Dew. He has an English final in two days, and he never finished reading _The Scarlet Letter_ before the Alpha pack started taking up all his homework time. Pearl is about to do something probably terrifying when that third Mountain Dew catches up to him. He places his highlighter in the spine of the book and starts down the hall.

He has his handle on the doorknob when the door whips open and catches him in the chest. With a gasp of air leaving his lungs, Scott stumbles backwards, and Isaac’s voice is a tongue twister of syllables, apologies and excuses. “I’m so sorry, Melissa; I didn’t— Scott?”

Scott grimaces, rubs at a sore spot on his sternum.

Isaac freezes, one hand holding the fold of his towel around his waist, the other still gripping the doorknob. “You— I thought you were your mom.”

Scott pulls the collar of his shirt away from his chest and looks down, watching a red plume that was supposed to turn into a bruise slowly fade away. “No, the water in my bathroom isn’t working so I.” He looks up, and his tongue feels swollen with all the things he cannot and doesn’t know how to say.

Isaac’s skin is a map of scars, welts and faded red lines crisscrossing and twisting.

“I thought scars were supposed to heal,” he says, mouth like cotton, because Scott is emotionally competent, but he’s human as well. Concern and fear and confusion trump ingrained sensitivity for a moment, and he feels sorry the moment the words tumble from his lips.

The line of Isaac’s broad shoulders shift. He looks down stupidly at his own scar-painted skin. “I guess it’s just the ones we get as werewolves that go away.” He never questioned it. He had gotten used to the patterns printed across his chest, his arms, his legs. He would be more concerned if they were gone than having to face them in the mirror every day.

He shuffles down the hall and slips into his room, shutting the door silently.

Scott goes through his motions, numb and empty for a moment, until he runs a cold tap and splashes his face, forcing himself to feel. He’s queasy when he goes back to Nathaniel Hawthorne. He doesn’t sleep much that night.

 

Allison sees it as they’re moving into their shitty two-story on the outskirts of town. Scott is chatting with neighbors who brought a casserole, and she bumps open the front door with her hip, awkwardly stumbling up the staircase until she can toss her belongings on the disassembled bedframe. In the doorway, she sees Isaac, crouched over an open cardboard box, a sweaty tee shirt in one hand.

The scars lash deliberately over his shoulder blades, and when she watches the bones glide under his skin, a chill shimmies up her spine. The welts once ran deep— Allison has enough scars of her own to know that much. Some are short and sharp, shiny, like they had been blistered onto the plane of his back.

Isaac can hear her, the pounding of her heart, but he rummages through the box without acknowledging her presence. She shoves her belongings onto a wobbly bedside table and squats slightly behind him, cautiously running her fingertips over the pain-licked skin. “What are you looking for?” she asks quietly, ignoring the tensing of his spine as he feels her touch.

“New shirt,” Isaac grunts. “Got this one caught on a door handle and tore it.”

Allison presses a kiss to his shoulder blade. His muscles relax just slightly. “What’s this from?” she asks, ghosting her fingers over a line that ringed the bottom of his neck.

“I don’t remember.” He straightens and stands, yanking a new shirt on before she can ask more questions. “I’m going to walk to the QuikTrip around the corner, grab us some water bottles. Do you want anything?”

Allison shakes her head, numb, in reply. He pecks at the skin where her hairline and forehead meet and disappears. She stumbles down the stairs after him. When he’s around the block and the neighbors have gone, Allison tugs Scott into an awkward embrace, needy and vulnerable. He juggles with the casserole and holding her close, asking no questions.

“His back,” Allison mutters into Scott’s collarbone.

Scott sighs in understanding. “You should see his chest.”

Over the years, Isaac categorizes some of them, pointing to lines and welts and telling their stories. It hurts, but it helps at the same time. Parts of Isaac that would always be there. Pain they could help shoulder, if only a little bit.


	8. Chapter 8

They’re lying, tangled, in bed. Backs being used as desktops. Bottles of fingernail polish, textbooks, crushed pillows, crumbs. The lamp by the bed glows soft white, casting long shadows over the creases in their clothes, in the sheets. Isaac groans. “I’ve got to stand up,” he warns Allison. She uses the pads of her fingers to lift wet nails and a magazine from the valley between his shoulders. He slips out of bed, rolls his neck. “I’m going to go grab myself a coffee from the QuikTrip.”

He wrestles a pair of boots from under the bed. Scott picks up his head, attentive. “Want some company?” Allison smiles at him.

Isaac shakes his head. “I won’t be long.”

He’s a ghost in the doorway when Scott calls, “Okay. Love you!” 

The reply is from down the hall. “Okay!”

Allison and Scott exchange a look. “Okay?” 

 

He comes back two hours later with mud on the bottom of his shoes, a crumpled to-go coffee cup in his hand. Bags ring his blue eyes. They’re sitting up, waiting. He jumps in fright when he turns into the room. “You’re awake.”

“Come sit down. We wanna talk to you,” Allison says, light, patting the mattress in front of her. Scott hears the anxious hammering of Isaac’s heart as he lowers himself to sit. A silence follows. Isaac shifts uncomfortably and waits. 

Finally, Scott clears his throat. “You know we love you, right?” he asks, careful. 

Isaac’s brow knits. “Yeah, of course I do.” 

Scott hears his pulse quicken but does not comment. He just nods his head. Allison has her mouth open to reply, but Scott places a hand on the small of her back. “Good.” He swallows. “You look tired. We’ll let you sleep now.”

 

Isaac brings in two Bud Lights and a root beer. He sits on the floor in front of the couch, tunes in immediately to the baseball game on television. He blindly hands up the two bottles. Amidst the cheering from Melissa and John and the wild noise blaring from the TV speakers, Allison leans forward and mutters in his ear, “Thank you. I love you,” and gives his shoulders a squeeze.

He looks at a stain on the carpet when he mutters, “You’re welcome.” He cracks open his can and wordlessly gulps. He doesn’t believe her. She lets it go.

 

Scott collapses onto the mattress, jello legs and shaky breath. Isaac yanks the sheets around his waist. A layer of sweat shines over his collarbones. Scott rolls onto his side, pushes curls out of the boy’s eyes. They catch their breaths, hearts thundering beneath heaving sternums. The radiator rattles under the window. Scott catches a glimpse of them in the mirror above the dresser, wrapped in wrinkled blankets, flushed and quirky smiled. “I love you.”

Isaac nods, eyes tracing a pattern on Scott’s pillowcase. His fingers furl and unfurl around a fistful of sheets. “I know.”

“Then why does your heart do that?” Scott asks, not accusatory. He lays his palm over Isaac’s heart. “Why does it always skip, like you don’t believe me?”

Isaac pulls his lower lip between his teeth and bites, blue eyes shifting. 

Whenever Allison and Scott say they love him, he looks at the floor— in Isaac’s language, that means sadness.

“I just… I don’t want you to say it,” he says slowly, voice low, “if you don’t really mean it.”

“We wouldn’t say it if we didn’t mean it,” Scott assures him. He shifts, carefully places Isaac’s hand over his heart. He waits in the silence as Isaac drags his gaze into Scott’s. “Isaac, I love you. That’s not a lie.”

Isaac simply nods. Scott doesn’t push.

 

Their house is so cold that even werewolves can’t stand it. Wrapped in their massive comforter, Scott pads downstairs with slit eyes and a quiet grumble. In the kitchen, he sits wordlessly beside Allison and plants his forehead onto the tabletop. He hears Isaac chuckle and the clink and slide of coffee cups being pushed across the table. Allison and Scott take the mugs in their hands gratefully. “Who told me becoming a vet would be a good idea? I was up until five o’clock studying for organic chem.”

“You told yourself that becoming a vet would be a good idea because you love taking care of animals,” Allison reminds him over her newspaper. 

Isaac scoots into the chair across from him, coffee steaming in his thin fingers. “You don’t need an A. You just need to pass. You can do that.”

“What about your developmental psych project?” Allison asks Isaac. She folds down the pages so she can see the boy in front of her. “Did you get that finished?” 

Isaac nods, stirs his coffee and sips.

Allison ceremoniously rises from the table and slips on her jacket. “Well, I’m off in the ten degree weather to meet Lydia for breakfast.” She pulls a purse over her shoulder and kisses the top of Scott’s head. “Bye.” She leans over, plants an identical peck on Isaac’s lips. “Love you.”

“Have fun.” His heart beat is steady.

Scott’s eyes brighten. When the door shuts behind Allison, he looks at Isaac again. “I love you.”

Isaac grins, at first just the corners of his lips, but then a great, big thing that transforms his whole face. He looks Scott in the eyes when he says, “I know.”

 


	9. Chapter 9

Allison is a hunter, but her life is more than that. It’s the people she loves and the knowledge she has and the things she loves to do. Sometimes, that’s archery, and sometimes, that’s sitting down for two hours a week to watch _The Bachelorette_ while enjoying Lydia’s commentary on shady eyebrow jobs and petty boy fights.

There are candy wrappers littering the floor, an hour’s worth of crumbs, empty wine glasses. Isaac trudges in the house during one of the commercials, stamping mud off his feet at the mat. “Hey, Alli. Hey, Lydia,” he says quietly, unwinding his scarf and depositing it on the coat rack. He knits his brow. “What are you watching?”

“ _The Bachelorette_ , and if you ask me Pedro is kind of a douchebag,” Lydia says. “She introduces him to her _dog_ , and he complains that he’s allergic? Girl deserves a medal. I’d have shot him by now.”

“Want to watch with us?” Allison asks. “There’s only an hour left.”

“I don’t know…” Isaac hesitates.

“I promise, your masculinity will be in tact at the end of the episode,” Lydia says with an eye roll. Isaac shrugs his shoulders, lines going soft as he embraces the safety of home. He folds onto the couch between the girls, legs propped on the coffee table.

 

The credits roll, and Isaac stares, slack-jawed. Lydia has her head on his shoulder, Allison in his lap, and he stares at them as if they’ve just dropped awe-striking news on him. “I can’t believe Greg would say something that mean to her. Does he not understand that he’s trying to get her to fall in love with him?” he asks, shaking his head.

Allison huffs a laugh. Lydia shakes her head. “Men are idiots, Lahey. I’ve been saying it for years.”

 

Allison has dinner with her father on the following Monday, and when she comes home, Isaac has the television on, a sketchbook in his lap. When he looks up, he says, “She cut Nathan and Josh, but for some reason, she gave Greg a rose, and I just don’t understand…” His voice breaks off, and he coughs. “Anyway. I recorded the episode for you. So… Yeah.”

He flips the cover of his sketchbook closed and scurries up the staircase, the apples of his cheeks red. Allison laughs in his wake.

She records the rest of the season, just in case.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter ended up being unusually long for this fic. I just had a lot to say, and once I got started, I couldn't stop. It was like word vomit. I apologize. In other news, I think this is my favorite chapter.

“You know, you could just _tell_ him you’re interested,” Scott suggests with a shrug, rolling his beer bottle between his palms. Stiles looks at him as if he’s grown a second head.

“Scott, that only works in the movies. 99.99% of the time, that ends in heartbreak. I’m not doing that. I need a big plan,” he demands, tossing back another shot with a shudder and an eye twitch.

Scott grins that crooked, soft grin of his. “It worked for me.”

“Yeah, well, of course it worked for you,” Stiles exclaims with a roll of his eyes. “That’s because you’re adorable. And chicks dig that.” Scott raises his brow. “And Isaac. Isaac digs that. Maybe it’s a werewolf thing, ‘cause I think Boyd was into it too.”

Scott feels the subtle vibrations of his phone in his pocket and smiles goofily at the picture of Allison on the screen, her face covered in ketchup, hands up in an “oh well” shrug. Isaac’s in the corner, laughing. “Hey, Allison. What’s up?”

“You gotta come home!” she yells. “Scott, he’s panicking, and you’ve got to get home _now_. I don’t know how long I can hold him off by myself.” Scott hears the rattling of a door, guttural growls. His heart sinks.

“I’m on my way.”

He jumps off his bike so fast that the wheels are still spinning where he leaves it in the grass. Scott springs up the stairs, ears turning to a point, claws reaching up, teeth descending. He reaches the bedroom to find it in a horrid state of disarray. Shredded sheets and curtains, upended side tables, cracked lamps. The door to the closet is scarred with scratches, and Isaac is no where to be found.

“Allison?” Scott asks. “Allison, it’s me.” He hears jimmying and clicking, and Allison stumbles out of the closet and straight into Scott’s arms, trembling and tear-stained, but upright. “Are you okay?”

She nods numbly, looks up. “We were sitting at the kitchen table. I went to grab some of the leftover Chinese food. I just… I asked if he wanted some, and…” She chokes on her words, but her eyes are not wet. She sets her jaw, determined. “He apologized before he ran off. I think he shifted back, but we’ve… we’ve gotta find him.”

Scott nods. “Come on. I’ll grab my extra helmet from the basement.”

 

They search for two hours, make twenty-nine calls to his phone, eleven phone calls to others. When they make it back home, all the lights are on. It’s a desperate race into the house, stomping over the creaking porch and pouring through the door. Allison still has her helmet on when she stops on the front mat. Isaac sits at their table, fingers carded through his curls, hunched over, impossibly small.

He stumbles to his feet, nearly knocking his chair over in the process. “Allison. Allison, I’m so sorry,” he pleads, crossing the room to her. Scott stands behind, claws slowly drawing, watching carefully. Isaac almost wraps Allison in a hug, but he sees the red flash in Scott’s eyes and hastily steps back. Scott trusts Isaac, in a clear headspace, trusts that he would never intentionally harm either one of them. Isaac in a clear headspace— not Isaac now. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, voice strained.

“What _happened_?” she demands. She’s more concerned than angry, but Allison still struggles between the two. In a hunter’s world, anger is power; concern is weakness. Sometimes, she forgets she doesn’t live by that code anymore.

Scott steadies her with a hand on her shoulder.

“It was… you touched me.” Isaac subconsciously presses a hand against the spot where she laid her own palm, the crook where the base of his neck met his shoulder, a place where corded scars peek out from the collar of his sweater. “I’ve been a little on edge this week. I didn’t mean to, Alli. I swear. D-did I hurt you?”

“Why have you been on edge this week?” Her voice is still biting, but only slightly. Scott’s brow furrows. “Did something happen?”

“It’s just…” Isaac worries his lip between his teeth, fingers curling, uncurling at his side. “It’s the four year anniversary of my dad’s death.”

A creature of habit, Isaac prefers to suffer alone, does not believe in asking other people to shoulder his pain. Contradictorily, he wants so badly for others to _want_ to help, wants other people to take all the horror away. But there is a difference, he knows, in them offering and him begging. He does not want to hand off his nightmares to unwilling participants, and as someone so consistently unsure of himself and his ability to be lovable, he refuses to believe that Allison and Scott genuinely want that sort of responsibility.

“Oh, Isaac,” Scott sighs. He cards his fingers through his hair, claws gone, eyes singular shade of brown again.

“You didn’t think that was important for us to know?” Allison voice shakes along with her hands, which she promptly tucks under her armpits to hide away. She is nerves of steel, but Isaac has seen the parts of her that are malleable, and it’s hard to hide that from him sometimes. She’s been through a lot tonight. Being attacked by her out-of-control werwolf boyfriend. Thinking he was hurt out in the world on his own. Thinking she had lost him.

“No, no, I did,” Isaac pleads. “I just… I forgot, I guess.”

“ _Forgot_?” she snaps back.

Isaac worries his lip between his teeth. “I guess I forgot that… forgot how… how much it brings back.” Honest, nervous. “I thought I could handle it by myself. It’s been _four years_ … But then I heard one of Camden’s favorite songs on the radio the other day, and it all just came back to me. And at that point, it just slipped my mind that you guys didn’t already know.”

Scott takes Allison’s helmet and sets it on the table, soft eyes and measured movements. He takes Isaac’s hand in his own, nods towards the living room. “I’m gonna make some hot chocolate, and we’ll talk.”

 

Isaac, whose nerves rattle through his limbs, sits in an armchair by himself while Scott and Allison settle onto the couch. Mugs of hot chocolate steam on the coffee table. No one bothers to sample them.

“So, talk to us, Ize,” Scott says, not demanding but serious. “What’s going on with you?”

Isaac taps his fingers on the plane of his thigh, like typing on keys. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“This time you have to,” Allison demands, defiant. When Isaac looks up, she challenges his gaze with a steady one of her own. “You _attacked_ me. You _have_ to talk about it.”

Isaac flinches, as if she physically struck him with her lash of words, but he nods and works his jaw. When he opens his mouth, his lip quivers, and he bites any rising words on the tip of his tongue.

Scott notices the distress and supplies, “Did you really forget to tell us? Or did you just not want to?”

He thinks. “Both.” Allison does not look satisfied. Scott is patient. “I wanted so badly not to tell you that I… I tricked myself into believing that you knew already. And then I just… forgot, I guess, that you really didn’t.”

He looks guilty.

“Why didn’t you want to tell us?” Scott questions. Normally, when someone talks in a slow, placid voice for the entirety of the conversation, like they’ve smoked too much weed and watched too many yoga tapes, Allison gets frustrated. Listening to Scott has a calming effect, though, and she can visibly see all of Isaac’s sharp lines soften as well.

Isaac wants so badly to be able to take steps forward in his life without his father gripping his shoelaces and dragging him down. It’s only Isaac himself who sets his reputation back, by allowing such events like tonight to happen. “Because… because it’s been four years,” Isaac stammers desperately. “Because if I ever want to be something other than the Abused Boy, I’ve got to get over this—”

“ _Over_ this?” Allison asks. “Isaac, you don’t get over something like what happened to you. You don’t _have_ to.” Isaac feels his heart sink in his chest, thinks he’s hearing rejection. He bites his lip, casts his gaze downward, sharp movements. “You don’t _get over it_ ,” Allison amends, softer, “but you move forward. And part of it, no matter how badly you want it to go away, part of it will always be with you. What you went through… I can’t even imagine.” She doesn’t try to. She doesn’t _want_ to. “But what happened to you doesn’t come without a few nightmares. And they _suck_.”

She wants to be more eloquent, wants to explain to him that every time she hears a story about a suicide on the news, she thinks about her mother and has to fight not to cry. Wants to tell him that she used to think the same way as him until she realized that scars don’t form on the dying, and having emotion means you’re _alive_. That sometimes, being alive is the only victory you have, and you have to take that at face value. Survival is a trophy he should have never fought for, but it is a prize he bravely earned.

She wants to be more eloquent, but she’s not, so instead she says, “It’s not fair. I know it’s not fair.” She can feel tears welling at her eyes that have nothing to do with her own tragedy. Scott’s hand slips into hers.

They fell in love with the boy plagued by nightmares, who was afraid of small spaces and locked doors. They fell in love with the boy with dangerous panic and angry scars, who harbored a resentment against a world that didn’t protect him. They fell in love with the boy who was trapped in a space without light or happiness and clung stubbornly onto the love he stored in his heart.

“When I think of you,” Scott starts, “I think of the guy who remembers what color shirt I wore to our second anniversary dinner. The one who brings me coffee in bed and lets me cry during _My Dog Skip_ , no judgment.”

He can see that Isaac is trembling, and he opens a spot between himself and Allison. Isaac gratefully folds himself in, burying his face into the crook of Scott’s neck, while Allison rubs small circles on his back.

“You are _not_ the Abused Boy. You’re the Boy Who Was Abused,” Scott tries to distinguish. Isaac shudders into his chest. “Don’t ever for one second think that what was done to you defines who you are. You were shaped by what was done to you, but you choose who you are. And you,” he says, “are strong and brave and loyal and considerate and so many other _awesome_ things. And we love you. No matter what.” He places a kiss within the boy’s mess of curls, breathes in his scent for a moment. “So try not to forget anymore, okay? We don’t want you to feel like you have to do this on your own.”

It takes some time, but Isaac sits up and starts from the beginning, tells them the stories, good and bad, of the times he had with his father. And though their hearts hurt, they listen, and they love.

Isaac will forget again. Or more like deliberately choose not to tell them. But for tonight, he allows himself to let them in. They don’t ask for any more than that.


	11. Chapter 11

Their days are bright with love. Even when it’s dark, even when they are smothered by bodies piling up, nightmares fighting back, everyday sensitivities, Allison and Scott and Isaac make the underlying current of their beings a wavelength of love.

Even when they fight, they make sure to end the day with an “I love you”. They can go to bed angry but not thinking that no one loves them. It is an unwritten rule, one carefully practiced. They don’t say it if they don’t mean, but they never _don’t_ mean it. They might be disappointed or furious with one another, but they always mean it when they say it. Always.

Love is easy. Living with one another isn’t. And they truly believe that.

It’s so different from the way that Isaac was raised that he feels uncomfortable wedged into the routine. When Allison leaves notes on the fridge, she signs them with hearts that are meant for him. When Scott gets off the phone, his goodbye is a declaration of adoration. It’s not that he doesn’t love them. It’s that he doesn’t know how to say it.

It’s not as easy as “I love you”. It means a lot coming from Allison and Scott because they genuinely believe in the power of those words. They have never given them out to people who don’t deserve it.

Isaac’s mother said I love you but not enough to stay around for him. Camden said I love you but not enough to stay at home and keep him safe. Isaac’s father always said I love you but not enough to treat him that way. “I love you, but I hate what you make me do.” Isaac was bred by liars who used I Love You as a weapon of manipulation, who said “I love you” but meant it with empty intentions. Isaac doesn’t think he knows _how_ to say I love you. But he tries.

Scott and Allison never doubt that Isaac loves them. They just like to hear it sometimes.

Whenever Allison wears his lacrosse sweatshirt, faded and frayed with age, she remembers the time that the washing machine broke, and she wore it for a week straight with spaghetti stains and droplets of red wine, and how she cried watching _Titanic_ in it, and Isaac told her that he loved her.

Scott remembers it when he smells the burn of charcoal, the tang of barbeque sauce. Remembers the time that Isaac made ribs on the grill and brought it to the vet clinic every night for a week while Scott helped Deaton with an overflow of animals. Remembers the way he left the brown bag on Scott’s desk with a note that said “ _Eat up! Love you_.”

They remember it whenever they make love, remember the first night they had shared together. Isaac trembling and scared, Isaac silently crying afterwards, saying he had never felt so happy, that he loved them so much.

When they listen, they hear it every day.

“Don’t forget your helmet!” when Scott’s about to get on his bike.

“Be careful” when Allison’s going out to hunt.

“I made your favorite meal!”

“I folded your laundry.”

“I’ve never told someone that before.”

“I feel safe with you.”

He loves them.

He _loves_ them.

And they, wholeheartedly, love him too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, there you have it! My first multi-chapter, completed fic. I had a lot of fun writing this! It wasn't tons of excitement, but I enjoy little peeks into the Scallisaac life! I hope you all enjoyed it!


End file.
